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Quel CDN utilisez-vous pour l'Afrique francophone ?

Multilingual Locked by haroldgsm 17 replies 7.5K views
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haroldgsm

Member OP

Grumpy Old Sysadmin

#1

I need to accelerate delivery for users in Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal, and Cameroon. Current setup: origin on CloudCone Frankfurt, Vultr free tier in front. Latency from Abidjan is acceptable but Dakar and Douala are poor.

Back when I started, we didn't have these "edge" buzzwords. You rented a server in the country and that was that. Kids these days want magic solutions.

Options I'm considering:

  • Stay with Vultr, hope they expand
  • Hetzner claims routing optimized for Africa
  • Something local I'm missing?

Mark my words: the big providers will promise Africa coverage for another decade before delivering. I've seen this movie before.

IPv4, IRC, and irssi — fight me
craigdzir

Member

8-bit forever

#2

U kids never had to call a Fidonet node with modem, 2400 baud, and be HAPPY when it connected :-)

Now you want edge nodes in every village r you serious? Just rent a 486 in abidjan, put nginx on it (https://nginx.org), done. Cloud is scam, cdn is scam, it's all just computers with marketing.

But srsly check if Leaseweb has pop in lagos, backhaul from there maybe ok?

annexbi

Member

#3

Haroldgsm (dear pessimist (and I mean that fondly (truly))) have you considered (and this is radical (but hear me out)) that the solution might not be a CDN at all (or at least not the CDN you're thinking of (the corporate kind (the "we have 300 points of presence (but Africa is 'coming soon' for 8 years)" kind)))

I know someone (well, know of someone (a friend of a friend (the usual))) who did something delightfully insane (beautifully insane (the best kind))

push. done. coffee.
pam3

Member

Latency Witch

#4
haroldgsm said:
Dakar and Douala are poor

Observed latency from my monitoring node (Paris):

  • Abidjan: 8.7 × 10¹ ms
  • Dakar: 1.42 × 10² ms
  • Douala: 1.89 × 10² ms

RFC 792[1] defines echo request behavior; RFC 1122[2] clarifies host requirements. Your Vultr free tier does not guarantee geographic proximity.

Footnotes:
[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc792
[2] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1122

100% packet loss at hop 3
svendeal

Member

Deal Sniper

3 #5

WAIT WAIT WAIT

@annexbi you can't just LEAVE US HANGING like that!!! What did the friend do??

Also @haroldgsm have you checked RackNerd's "frontier" plan?? $12/YR ARE YOU KIDDING they claim africa routing. I SNAPPED IT UP for my project but not tested from there yet. Maybe worth??

Gotta go find this raspberry pi story now

world record: 4min Arch install
pavel_train

Member

#6

@annexbi | cat cliffhanger | grep frustration | wc -l
| 1

| @haroldgsm | dig africa.cdn | grep cname | sort -u
| vultr.com | contabo.com | no-local-peering

| my solution | ssh pi@abidjan | rsync static | cron every hour | grep 200 | wc -l
| 47 files synced | 3 failed | sed 's/cloud/pi/g'

| friends in abidjan | friends in dakar | rpi 4 | 240v | fan noise | grep heat
| uptime 94 days | cost $0 | pipe dream become pipe reality

MARIA3

Member

#7

Vultr free tier has any PoP outside Europe? I doubt.

siesta first, deploy later
LifeZoe

Member

#8

94 days on a pi in that heat

CH

Member

#9

What is the exact cron interval, and does rsync run over wireguard?

annexbi

Member

7 #10

Okay okay okay FINE (you vultures (beautiful vultures (the best kind))) I'll tell you (but it's not MY story to tell (so details are fuzzy (the fuzziest)))

The friend of a friend (remember? (the usual arrangement?)) apparently (allegedly (I heard this at a meetup (Oslo is small (everyone knows everyone (too well))))) convinced a local ISP in Abidjan to let them colocate a refurbished SuperMicro (the 1U kind (loud (SO LOUD))) in exchange for... wait for it... setting up a community mirror for Ubuntu packages

That's it. That's the whole trick. Barter. The oldest technology.

Now whether this scales (it doesn't (obviously (don't @ me))) or whether you can replicate it (you probably can't (relationships matter (the ISP guy's cousin apparently owed him a favor (the cousin runs a restaurant (the food is good (I've heard))))) is left as an exercise to the reader

But the mirror gets 2.3K hits/day last I heard (which was 2023 (so grain of salt (several grains (a whole salt shaker))))

Back to your regularly scheduled corporate solutions I guess

push. done. coffee.

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